Military paranoia

America "uses military exchanges with PLA to disrupt China and brainwash politicians". Video producer says same tactics were used to cause Soviet Union collapse in 1991 

 By Minnie Chan

   

Liu Yazhou

Influential military researchers have accused the United States, in a video they helped produce, of using exchanges between American defence officials and the PLA to undermine the state and corrupt officials.

Military experts said the claims threatened to harm exchanges between the two countries and showed the PLA was trying to address the spread of graft within its ranks and the party.
The unusually hardline video in which the military researchers are quoted was produced by the PLA's National Defence University, based in Beijing, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences along with the army's General Staff Department.
"The American elites... confidently believe that the best way to disorganise China is to work closely with it, allowing it to gradually become part of the US-led international and political system," said General Liu Yazhou, the university's political commissar and one of the video's producers.
The 100-minute video appears to be intended for internal distribution but copies have circulated online and state censors had not taken them down as of yesterday.
A second producer of the video is General Wang Xibin, a former president of the university.
The video lists several strategies it says the US uses in a bid to weaken the state, including cultural exports, bribing and brainwashing rising young Chinese political stars, and training pro-American activists and scholars through exchange programmes, including ones involving defence officials.
It said Washington used the same tactics to cause the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and to influence the "jasmine revolution" that toppled Tunisia's former strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011.
Dr Zeng Zhiping, a retired lieutenant colonel and expert in military law, said the propaganda effort would hurt the two countries' military exchange efforts.
"Only blinkered military officials would be easily brainwashed," said Zeng, who spent last year in the US on a fellowship studying military law.
"I am afraid that under such hardline propaganda, only politically correct officials will be sent to study overseas, and that's not a good thing for young officers who are keen on learning advanced military thinking in the West and discovering its culture."
Shanghai-based military expert Ni Lexiong said the film illustrated the contradiction the army and the party faced in trying to instil "traditional Red virtues -- hardship and simplicity" -- amid the corruption that has taken root after 30 years of economic opening up.
"The party is reluctant to find out the real reasons behind corruption... and blaming US infiltration is … convenient, " he said.
Dr Richard Bitzinger, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, said the video showed that many top PLA leaders harboured long-standing fears about Western countries' ideological infiltration of the army.
"It is no secret that many in the PLA have been worried for a long time that the so-called softening of young politicians and opinion leaders, partially as a result of their exchanges with the United States, could break China's resolve to defend key strategic interests," he said.

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Ethnic Uighurs are facing new police scrutiny in Beijing following Tiananmen attack

By Associated Press

Uighur jade vendors sell their wares at an outdoor curio market where Chinese police have been checking their IDs everyday since a vehicle attack in Beijing, China, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Members of China’s ethnic Uighur community in Beijing say they’re facing stepped-up scrutiny from police following Monday’s deadly vehicle attack at Tiananmen Square in Beijing that killed five people.

An SUV plowing into a crowd in Tiananmen Square, killing five

BEIJING — In a dusty outdoor curio market in China’s capital, traders from the minority Uighur community gathered Wednesday to swap stories about the omnipresent harassment they say they suffer at the hands of the police. 

That scrutiny has only intensified after this week’s deadly vehicle attack at Tiananmen Square in which Uighurs are the prime suspects.
Before the day ended, five suspects had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in Monday’s audacious attack, which a police statement described as carefully planned terrorism strike — Beijing’s first in recent history. 

Police also said knives, iron rods, gasoline and a flag with religious slogans were found in the vehicle used in the suicide attack.
Since the attack, police “come to search us every day. We don’t know why. Our IDs are checked every day, and we don’t know what is happening,” said Ali Rozi, 28, a Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) trader at the sprawling Panijayuan market.
“We have trouble every day, but we haven’t done anything,” said Rozi, who is from Kashgar, the capital of Xinjiang province where most Uighurs live.
Militants from the Muslim Uighur community have been fighting a low-intensity insurgency against Chinese rule in Xinjiang for years. 

Recent clashes, including an attack on a police station, have left at least 56 people dead this year. 

The government typically calls the incidents terrorist attacks.
The police scrutiny of the Uighurs in Beijing highlights the years of discrimination that have fueled Uighur demands for independence for their northwestern homeland of Xinjiang. 

Many Uighurs say they face routine discrimination, irksome restrictions on their culture and Muslim religion, and economic disenfranchisement that has left them largely poor even as China’s economy booms.
In Monday’s incident, a sports utility vehicle barreled through crowds and burst into flames near the portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Gate. 

Three of the car’s occupants and two bystanders were killed, and dozens were injured in the strike at the capital’s political heart, where China’s Communist Party leaders live and work.
The incident is the first such attack outside Xinjiang in years, and among the most ambitious given the high-profile target.
An attack in one of the eastern population centers is “something that the Chinese authorities have been worried about for a long time,” said University of Michigan expert Philip Potter.
“Once this threshold has been crossed, it is a difficult thing to constrain,” Potter said, predicting tighter surveillance and scrutiny of Uighurs in eastern cities.
Rozi Ura Imu, a 48-year-old trader in jade and other precious stones from the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, condemned the attack, but said it didn’t justify the harsher treatment by authorities.
“I am also upset. They crashed a car, and we end up being harassed by police every day now, saying that we Xinjiang people are like that,” Rozi said, standing at the gate of the Panijayuan market, which has thousands of stalls featuring crafts from regions throughout China: rows of statues and furniture, bins of beads and trinkets, cases of books and scrolls.
Uighurs are a Turkic Central Asian people related to Uzbeks, Khazaks and other groups. 

With their slightly European features and heavy accents, most are immediately recognizable as distinct from China’s ethnic Han majority.
The 9 million Uighurs now make up about 43 percent of the population in Xinjiang, a region more than twice the size of Texas where they used to dominate.
Many complain of strict government controls not seen in other parts of China, including a ban on religious observance by minors and injunctions against traditional male cultural gatherings called meshreps. 

Recent moves to mainly use Chinese in Xinjiang schools have raised fears of the further erosion of Uighur language and culture, as well as job losses for Uighur teachers.
Uighurs also say they’ve seen little benefit from the exploitation of Xinjiang’s natural resources while good jobs tend to flow to ethnic Han migrants.
Uighurs frequently say they’re made to feel like second-class citizens, facing difficulties obtaining passports or even traveling outside Xinjiang. 

Hotels and airlines are reported to have unofficial bans on catering to Uighurs, and many employers refuse to hire them.
“Hotels won’t take us and you can’t rent if your ID shows a Xinjiang residence. People look at us with a lot of prejudice,” said Yusuf Mahmati, 33, a fur trader plying his wares on a busy sidewalk opposite the Panijayuan market, a gathering place for traders from several regional ethnic groups.

The Beijing police statement said the five detained suspects had helped plan and execute the attack, and were caught 10 hours after it was carried out. 

It said they had been on the run and were tracked down with the help of police in Xinjiang and elsewhere. 

It didn’t say where they were captured, but said police had found jihadi flags and long knives inside their temporary lodgings.
“The initial understanding of the police is that the Oct. 28 incident is a case of a violent terrorist attack that was carefully planned, organized and plotted,” the statement said.
The overseas advocacy group World Uyghur Congress on Tuesday urged caution and expressed concerns that Beijing could use the incident to demonize Uighurs as a group.
Beijing-based Uighur economist Ilham Tohti urged the government to make public its findings if it indeed has evidence that Uighurs were involved in a terrorist attack. 

He said repression against Uighurs would only get harsher.
“Most certainly, this incident will worsen the situation for Uighurs,” Tohti said.
Tohti has faced frequent police harassment for his activism. 

He was placed under house arrest numerous times in the wake of deadly ethnic rioting in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in 2009 that sparked a nationwide crackdown on Uighur activists.
The Urumqi violence, which left nearly 200 dead, most of them Han, had strong ethnic overtones, beginning with a protest over the killing of Uighur workers at a south China toy factory over false rumors of sexual assaults on Chinese women. 

China termed the bloodshed a terrorist attack planned by overseas-based Uighur rights advocates and heavily increased its security presence in Xinjiang.
Chinese authorities rarely provide direct evidence to back up terrorism claims, and critics say ordinary crimes or cases of civil unrest are often labeled as organized acts of terror.
However, Xinjiang borders Afghanistan and unstable Central Asian states with militant Islamic groups, and Uighurs are believed to be among militants sheltering in Pakistan’s lawless northwestern region.
Uighurs were also captured by U.S. forces following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and 22 were held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

All but three have since been released and now reside in Albania, Bermuda and elsewhere.
China has largely been successful at limiting both the volume and effectiveness of domestic terrorist attacks, while containing them mainly to Xinjiang.
However, the Chinese government has warned that radicals were planning attacks outside of Xinjiang and launching strikes in China’s eastern population centers offers “easy access to soft, high-profile targets as well as an information and media environment that is increasingly ripe for terrorist exploitation,” Potter said.

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Uighur group scorns China Tiananmen 'terrorist' claim

Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer (L) and Alim Seytoff, pictured on December 10, 2010 being greeted by Nancy Pelosi in Oslo
Beijing (AFP) — A Uighur group dismissed Beijing's account of a "terrorist attack" in Tiananmen Square as a dubious pretext to repress the ethnic minority Thursday, even as state-run media hinted at potential repercussions.
Beijing police said on Wednesday that Usmen Hasan -- in an SUV carrying his mother and wife, jihadist banners and machetes -- sped onto the pavement, crashed in Tiananmen Square and set the car alight.
The crash in the symbolic heart of the Chinese state killed all three people in the car and two tourists, with 40 others injured.
Five other suspects with Uighur-sounding names were captured within 10 hours, although police only announced their detention two days later.
The mostly Muslim Uighur minority are concentrated in China's far western region of Xinjiang, where ethnic tensions and discontent with the government periodically burst out into violence.
Beijing regularly calls such incidents "terrorism", but Uighur organisations dismiss that as an excuse to justify religious and security restrictions, and information in the area is tightly controlled.
Alim Seytoff, a US-based spokesman for the overseas World Uyghur Congress (WUC), said the official narrative of the Tiananmen event was full of holes and discriminatory.
"The Chinese claim is in a way very unbelievable, to some extent outrageous," he told AFP.
"The only reason this is labelled as a terrorist incident is because the passengers happened to be Uighurs."
Seytoff questioned why an attacker would kill his own family, and how religious material could survive in a car engulfed in flames.
"If he were a terrorist, why would he bring his mother and his wife?" Seytoff said.
"The car was burned almost to the ground, the three people were burned to death, and the flag wasn't burned -- in the car?"
The account fit what Seytoff called a pattern of authorities labelling Uighurs as terrorists based on "thin evidence".
"We do not believe there is any kind of organised resistance against Chinese rule," he said.
"Some of the violence by Uighurs -- they are more sporadic, individualistic, out of desperation."
According to Chinese state-run media a "terrorist attack" in Xinjiang left 35 people dead in June, and 139 people have been arrested in recent months for spreading jihadist ideology.
Ethnic tensions have risen in Xinjiang since millions of members of China's Han majority have moved to the resource-rich region, where they largely control the economy. 

Rioting in the capital Urumqi involving both ethnic groups in 2009 left 200 people dead.
Seytoff warned Uighurs could face tighter repression after Monday's incident, particularly in the capital, where the WUC said 93 people have been rounded up.
Security has been bolstered across Xinjiang, where officers already maintain checkpoints, break up small gatherings and raid homes, he added.
State-run media warned Thursday that Uighurs would be the "biggest victims" of the Tiananmen Square attack.
Police had refrained from stating the attackers' ethnicity but the Global Times, which is close to the ruling Communist party, said that all those involved were Uighurs.
The paper, which often strikes a nationalist tone, called for a "united front against terrorism".
"People from Xinjiang, especially the Uighurs, will be the biggest victims," it said. 

"The ordinary work and study of Xinjiang people in inland regions may be affected."
It urged people in Xinjiang to "understand the negative effects and overcome them by cooperating with their inland counterparts".
At the same time it called on Han Chinese to reach out to the minority group and "make the Uighurs feel our sincerity".
An editorial in the state-run China Daily also suggested Uighurs might feel repercussions after Monday's incident.
"What they have done is against the interests and will of the majority of Uighurs, who have benefited from the unity of the country, from the reform and opening-up, and from the country's preferential policies for non-Han ethnic groups," it said.

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This Video Of Chinese Street Food Made From 'Gutter Oil' Is The Most Disgusting Thing You Will See All Day

By Mamta Badkar

The next time you consider eating Chinese street food you might think twice.
The use of gutter oil it turns out is pretty common. 

This refers to a process of pulling waste oil from sewers, grease traps, waste from slaughterhouses, reprocessing it and then selling it as cooking oil.
These screenshots from a Radio Free Asia (RFA) video via Max Fisher at The Washington Post show a woman in Shenzhen pulling slop from a gutter.

The slop then ends up in "processing" plants where it is processed with other animal fat through filtration or boiling.

The oil eventually make its way to "street vendors and hole-in-the-wall restaurants" that use it as "recycled cooking oil." 

Watch the entire video below:

Gutter oil is reported to account for one-tenth of cooking oil in China, according to experts cited by RFA. Besides being downright disgusting, the oil is also said to contain carcinogens and other toxins.
China has long battled food safety concerns. 

But in a country where cooking oil is at a premium, it will likely be a while before officials can effectively crack down on the practice.

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Taiwan demands Apple change map that shows it as part of China

Taiwan "intensely dissatisfied" over application error that places it under the sovereignity of China

By Julian Ryall

Taiwan has angrily demand that Apple Inc. alter its new map application, which identifies the island nation as a province of China.
Users of the iOS 7 and version 10.9 of OS X for the new iPhone and computers have discovered that any search for "Taiwan" automatically produced simplified Chinese characters that read "China Taiwan province."
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Taipei instructed its office in San Francisco to demand that Apple make an immediate correction to the software.
"We have made representations to Apple," Kelly Hsieh, head of the ministry's Department of North American Affairs, told reporters in Taipei.
"The designation of the mapping system has apparently deviated from the truth and has degraded our country's sovereignty," The China Post reported Hsieh as saying. 

"Matters like this must not be compromised.
"We have expressed our intense dissatisfaction to the company and demanded that it amend the error immediately," Hsieh added.
Taiwan is deeply sensitive about the way in which it is described in international circles and prefers to be known as the Republic of China. 

That name has been officially recognised by 23 countries, although Beijing insists that the island is part of greater China.
Beijing has in the past threatened to use force to reunite the island with the mainland, although ties have improved in recent years with the election of a government in Taipei headed by Ma Ying-jeou that is actively promoting trade and tourism opportunities.
First elected in 2008, Ma was re-elected as recently as January 2012.
The error is not the first time that Taiwan has protested to Apple over its mapping service application. 

Earlier this year, the Ministry of National Defence filed a protest after the company exposed the location of a secret radar station in northern Hsinchu County.

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China’s Spying on Russians by Implanting Chips Into Kettles, Irons

Russian report says Chinese appliances hide Wifi slurping spam-spreaders

By Jordan Valinsky

The Chinese are hacking into electric irons and tea kettles to somehow set off massive spam attacks.
In a bizarre report from a Russian-owned television station, the Rossiya 24 version of the I-Team found that Chinese-imported kettles and irons are equipped with "spy chips" that resemble "little microphones." Apparently, the hidden buggers connect via unprotected Wi-Fi networks to a computer within 700 feet and spread viruses. 

Custom officials have found more than 30 products with the chips, including phones and dashboard cameras.
The suspiciously powerful chips are supposedly capable of blasting out spam attacks without the computer owner's knowledge. 

Per The Register, the story is legitimate and not some conspiracy theory concocted to distract from the disaster that is the winter Olympics.
One source the story mentions, Gleb Pavlov of customs broker Panimport can be found at the link we've popped in on the company's name. 

We've also been able to find this link to an appliances company called “Sable Ltd”, the very name translation engines say is the employer of one Innokenty Fedorov whose company found the bugged appliances.

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Australian scientists confirm Chinese horseshoe bats responsible for SARS virus

By Margaret Paul, Cameron Best

The SARS virus appears to have originated in horseshoe bats from China.

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus which killed 774 people originated in horseshoe bats from China, scientists have confirmed.
SARS killed nearly 10 per cent of the people it infected during the 2002-2003 pandemic, mainly in China and Hong Kong.
A research team, which included scientists from the CSIRO in Geelong, found a very close relative of the virus in faecal samples from horseshoe bats.
Researcher Gary Crameri said scientists long suspected bats were the origin of the virus.
"We've been looking at bats for the past eight years, looking for this particular virus," he said.

"Although a lot of groups across the world have been, this particular virus can affect humans like the original one and that's really been the key to this particular virus."
Mr Cameri said it was possible the bats had developed a productive relationship with the virus over many years.
"But when they spill out into other mammals, like humans, they can be devastating," he said.
Mr Crameri said the focus was on finding the virus's origin and other similar viruses, rather than a vaccine.
"It's key for us to get a clear understanding of bats and the role that not only them. but other animals will play in future health scenarios," he said.
Mr Crameri said SARS bats do not pose a risk to people in general, but he encouraged people to be wary when handling them.
"The less we encroach on their environments the better," he said.

While SARS is now under control because wet markets are being controlled by authorities, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), caused by another coronavirus, is currently a problem.
Mr Crameri says the MERS virus, which also appears to come from a microbat, binds to human cells via a different receptor and is less infectious than SARS, although kills a higher percentage of those it infects.
Bats are an ancient animal that diverged from other mammals 80 million years ago and Mr Crameri said this could explain why they carry a high number of pathogens that they themselves are unaffected by.
"The bats and the viruses have evolved together," he said.
Experts have welcomed the new research.
"To this point, no one had been able to find the SARS coronavirus in bats," Sanjaya Senanayake, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Australian National University, said.
"Of the 40 or so new infections in humans discovered in the last 40 years, most have come from animals.
"Now that animals, including bats, and humans live closer together as our population expands globally, the opportunity for direct transmission of these dangerous viruses becomes more and more of an issue."
Professor Charles Watson, John Curtin Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Curtin University, says the recent outbreak of MERS reminds us coronaviruses are a potential cause of major human epidemics.
"The 2002 coronavirus pandemic, caused by the SARS coronavirus... was a serious public health threat, with over 8,000 cases worldwide," he said.
"While the MERS... outbreak has so far infected less than 200 individuals, it is clear that the coronavirus must be carefully watched."
The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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China’s Expanding Cabbage Strategy

By Harry Kazianis

In one of the best pieces on the subject in recent years, the New York Times magazine released what can best be described as an interactive feast regarding the delicate subject of the South China Sea. 

Beneath all the interactive maps, previously unreleased photos and eye-catching video were some interesting aspects of China’s strategy regarding this disputed area that is sure to be of interest to Asia hands.
The article itself is certainly worth your time just for the sheer artistic quality in which this important issue is covered. 

Sticking to the business at hand, there was one specific section that caught my eye. 

The piece notes comments from PLA General Zhang Zhaozhong regarding what is being called China’s “cabbage strategy.” 

The Times describes it as “surrounding a contested area with so many boats — fishermen, fishing administration ships, marine surveillance ships, navy warships” that the disputed island is essentially wrapped like layers of cabbage. 

A friend of mine has another name for this strategy: small-stick diplomacy.
While General Zhang is not one to shy away from controversial statements, the actual idea is nothing new and has made the pages of many other publications. 

Yet, looking at Chinese actions over the last two years or so, one has to wonder whether such a cabbage strategy has moved into a more active phase beyond the South China Sea and into even more deadly waters.
In the East China Sea, China’s claims over the Senkaku islands continue to press ahead. 

On Monday, according to Kyodo News, four Chinese coast guard vessels entered the area around the islands. The report explained it was the first such incursion since October 1st. 

More importantly — it was the sixty-eighth such incident since Tokyo purchased the islands from private Japanese owners in September of last year. 

When a Japanese patrol craft told the Chinese vessels to leave, one of the ships responded the islands had been “China’s inherent territory since ancient times.”
Making matters even more complex, China’s claims could be even reaching new heights. 

In May, The Diplomat reported on a commentary piece in the People’s Daily in which the authors pressed China’s claims over Okinawa and the Ryukyu islands. 

While the Chinese government is quick to move away from such claims, recent actions may prove quite telling.

The Financial Times reports that Tokyo scrambled fighter aircraft for a third straight day on Sunday. 

This was in response to flights by Chinese military aircraft over the Okinawan islands. 

The article also noted that “a Chinese reconnaissance plane was spotted by the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force on Friday and again over the weekend, this time accompanied by a bomber jet.”
The interesting and natural question to me is would China press its claims in an even more rigorous manner? For example, could we see Beijing surround the Senkakus in a cabbage like way in the near future. 

To be blunt, I doubt it.
Obviously, Japan is not the Philippines, the subject of the New York Times magazine article. 

Tokyo has many ways it could respond to such an action, including the backing of a powerful ally that has many assets on its shores that could prove most helpful if tough words needed to be matched by even stronger actions (AKA the United States).
Beijing also may have already reached the limits of what Tokyo is willing to stomach over such aggressive actions in the East China Sea. 

In an interview that appeared on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seemed to suggest that his country is ready to take a more assertive security role in Asia, especially when it comes to Chinese actions that have stirred tensions in recent years.
“There are concerns that China is attempting to change the status quo by force, rather than by rule of law. But if China opts to take that path, then it won't be able to emerge peacefully," Abe explained.
"So it shouldn't take that path, and many nations expect Japan to strongly express that view. And they hope that as a result, China will take responsible action in the international community."
Such comments, combined with news that Japan could shoot down foreign drones that might pass over its territory all seem like veiled threats aimed at China to back off claims that could spark a crisis.
For its part, China must carefully assess whether such actions are truly in its own interests. 

As many scholars have pointed out, anytime a rising power attains a certain level of might, fear of its intentions, even if undeserved, can spark a classic security dilemma.
The question for Beijing is quite simple: is a possible fight over such islands worth it? 

Considering the worst case scenario, I would be hard pressed to see how.
In the end, a cabbage strategy might be worth just as much as the name it has been bestowed.

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Depressed Chinese bachelor cuts his penis off

because it's surplus to requirements then cycles to hospital for treatment (but forgets to take severed organ with him) 

Daily Mail

 

Agony: Yang Hu, pictured in hospital, severed his own penis because he thought it was surplus to requirements since he couldn't find a girlfriend 

A Chinese man frustrated at being single cut off his own penis then, in agony, decided to cycle to a hospital for treatment.
When he arrived doctors told him they couldn't help save his manhood and ordered him to cycle back home to get the penis before he could be treated.
When Yang Hu, 26, eventually arrived back at the hospital with the severed member, doctors told him that it had been without blood for too long, and it was impossible to reattach it.
Yang's friends said that he had been increasingly depressed about the fact that since moving to the city he could not find a girlfriend.
What was worse, they said, was that he was doing such long hours in a clothing factory in Jiaxing, in Zhejiang province in east China, that he doubted he would ever have a chance to meet a woman.
His depression grew so bad that after returning home after work at 9pm on October 27 to his rented room he had suddenly decided to cut off his member as there was no use for it anyway, and believing it would stop him thinking about getting a girlfriend.
Incredibly he managed to cycle to the hospital, then cycled home again to collect the severed member and then back to the hospital.
His friends criticised doctors saying that had they provided the man with an ambulance he might have managed to get home quicker and his private parts could have been saved.

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China Patriotism Campaign Backfires in Tibet

by Yeshi Dorje

A Chinese national flag is raised outside a residential building in Lhasa.

A Chinese government campaign to build patriotism in Tibet appears to have backfired, leading to protests, mass shootings and detentions in a restive area 560 kilometers northeast of Lhasa.
Tibetan sources tell VOA that Wu Yingjie, the vice party secretary of Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) started a campaign in August to address the rebellious reputation of Driru County, known as Biru in Mandarin.
As part of his “Making Driru a Peaceful and Friendly [Place]” campaign, Wu began a prolonged tour of the area.
But his efforts turned into a disaster, according to information received by a Tibetan exile group.
The Drasogdrisum Association, a Dharamsala group of exiles from the region, says violence erupted in the area in late September after Chinese officials ordered Tibetans in Driru to raise Chinese national flags on their houses.
Ngawang Tharpa, the head of Drasogdrisum Association, says the authorities warned that those who disobeyed would not have the right to send their children to school, receive medical treatment in hospitals or to collect caterpillar fungus, an extremely expensive medicinal plant that is found in the area.
Despite the warning, Tibetans in Mowa village, 15 kilometers from the county seat, dumped Chinese flags into a river, according to a letter from Tibet circulated via the online service Wechat and other sources that Tharpa’s group received from phone conversations.
Chinese police clashed with villagers when they arrived to make arrests for the flag dumping.
The same sources said Chinese soldiers immediately took control of the village.
A letter from Tibet said about five to seven soldiers guarded each house and that Tibetans in the village were not allowed to even “go outside to use the toilet.”
Some reports said soldiers raised the Chinese flags on Tibetan houses.
That evening, as many as 1,000 Tibetans gathered outside the local government building and began a 24-hour hunger strike while lying on a road to block military vehicles.
In interviews with VOA, exiles said about 40 Tibetans from nearby villages were detained and beaten when they went to appeal for the withdrawal of Chinese troops.
They were later released after protesters agreed to end their demonstration.
“They were photographed from every side of their bodies and their fingerprints were taken before they were released,” said Tashi Gyaltsen, a Tibetan in India who is from the area.
Reports filed by several exiled Tibetans, who did not want to be named, said the people were severely injured and were not allowed to leave their homes to get medical treatment after their release.
One Tibetan using the pen name Migchu (Tear) reported from Lhasa via Wechat.com: “Thousands of soldiers and armed police from Lhasa, Shigatse and Lhokha went toward Driru on September 30 and October 1.”
Chinese state-run radio said that on October 3, vice part secretary Wu met with the police in Driru, thanking them for their service and advising them to strike hard at those who engage in criminal activities to harm national security and social stability.
Reports say three days later Chinese security forces fired on a crowd of Tibetans in Dhathang Township, about 68 kilometers northwest of the Driru county seat.
The crowd was protesting against armed police and work teams searching the home of a man who was arrested for showing his disapproval of education programs designed to build patriotism for China.
Amnesty International reports that as many as 60 people were injured from gunshots or beatings.
State-run news media in Tibetan areas, which have never mentioned the protests, quote Wu as saying the government will push forward with its patriotism campaign in the area.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, did not directly address the events in Driru but told VOA that media outlets should focus on the broader picture of economic development in Tibet.
“I do not know the specifics you mentioned," she said.
"Any unbiased person will agree that over the 60 years after the peaceful liberation of Tibet, development has been improved and social stability has been maintained. We hope relevant media organizations will stop single-mindedly focusing on specific cases and look at the progress of Tibet more broadly.”
Tibet has been under the control of the Chinese Communist government in Beijing since 1950.

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No quick fix for China's mistress culture

By Thorsten Pattberg

There is something I must tell you about China: It is rather morally creative in the usage of its women.
There isn't a hotel, massage parlor, ktv, or conference hall in town that isn't frequented by "little sisters" (xiaojie), escort personnel (baopo), hostesses (peinü), or other types of prostitutes (jinü).
There's a name for any relationship a female plaything may fall into:
Here are the "second wives" (er laopo), women [who may have family or kids but] who indulge in extramarital affairs with men, married or not.
Then we have "the thirds" (disanzhe) who are casual love affairs only.
The queen of all female roles, however -- in direct competition with the faithful "wife" (laopo) -- is the "mistress" (qingren).
The mistress, a femme fatale, not only embodies adventure and carnal pleasures, but is also the surest status symbol a man can wish for: She shows you have money!
Technically, only married men can have mistresses; otherwise, if the gentleman is single, we would refer to his female company -- however many of them -- as simple "girlfriends" (nüpengyou).
The Chinese tradition of maintaining mistresses is based on what good Christians would refer to as adultery -- a sin; yet in China it is mere custom -- a habit.
Consequently, when Westerners first come to China, they are utterly perplexed by the strict division here between marriage, romance, and sex -- for which, in Chinese thinking, of course (at least) three different types of women are required.
Xu Qiya, a Jiangsu party official, had clearly set a local record with 140 mistresses; we know because he kept a sex diary; but he isn't an inventor: In fact, I have yet to meet a dulcet Chinese girl who has not been offered a gift from a married man at some time.
At least, that's what they told me.
Accepting any gift from a married man, whether it being a handbag, jewelry, a car, a trip to the beaches of Hainan, is the unspoken agreement of becoming the mistress of that benefactor.
It is the lure and excitement of an extraordinary life-style -- luxurious, free, illicit, and irresponsible -- that drives ever more 20-somethings not to marry, or at least to postpone it until their bodies become less marketable.
Those entrepreneurial women, of course, fill the pool of potential future mistresses in China to the brim.
If a woman is not married by the age of 26, she "expired" and is usually stigmatized as "leftover woman" (shengnü).
Now let us talk about the situation of the Chinese married man.
Post-marital infidelity is encouraged in China just as pre-marital sex is encouraged in Europe.
In comparison to the West, only very few wives in China will file for divorce upon discovery of her husband's infidelity.
It is rather sad.
In China, sex and power are a pair.
State-run Xinhua News recently found that 95% of all corrupt officials in China also kept mistresses.
And Tom Doctoroff, an economist, estimates that second wives probably account for one-third of China's entire consumption of luxury goods.
Let us talk about China's capital, Beijing.
From top to bottom, it isn't a place for connubial happiness: It's a very patriarchal society (there is mistress culture, but no such things as mister culture), and some of the most powerful men, including the Communist Party of China, create and procreate here, trailed by legions of businessmen, scholars, diplomats, and entrepreneurs, who mostly see no problem in renting a maid for warming their pillows.
In fact, the magazine Business Insider quoted a vice-ministerial-level official who insisted that "there is no official at his level who doesn't have at least a few lovers".
It is a must-have.
The victim is the young woman of China.
As her feelings for any particular man dwindles (they are all cheaters, no?), she too becomes emotionally detached, and regards being a mistress as a form of business, or transactions of favors -- a form of consumerism.
There are several grades of "maintaining" (baoyang) a mistress: The cheapest, of course, is to bed a university student.
She is young, flexible, poor, and full of romantic ideas in her head.
She will eventually marry a fellow classmate, but until then she may want to sneak out and bag a sugar daddy in Wudaokou, Zhongguancun, or Shaoyang district.
Next is the working woman.
She is independent, has experience, and owns or rents her own place. (She might be even married, but, with her husband banging the next hostess at the local karaoke bar, she probably thinks what the heck.)
Perhaps the highest cost of maintenance goes to the trophy mistress (huaping, a "flower pot").
Her goal and profession is to conquer the most powerful man she can find at a time.
It's a life-style -- it's her religion.
Enormous financial resources, and a good amount of drama, are necessary to snag such high-profile gold digger.
It has been observed that many Chinese women opt out of the Chinese tradition of cheating husbands and try to find a foreigner, preferably from a traditional monogamous society like Western Europe.
Those "foreigners" (laowai) may also cheat on their spouse, of course, but for individual reasons, not, as is the case in China, as a social prescription or norm.
And so the mistress culture of China lives on, from vulgar to lustrous and glittering, and if the endless supply of young women for successful men does not ebb -- and if women don't divorce -- the husband and his lovers will happily drive the market for luxury goods, hotel rooms, and publications about mistresses, and, almost as an afterthought, minister to their ethical ruin.

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Kept women

Mistresses are big business in China, where no official is a real man without his own ernai. What’s in it for the girls?
by James Palmer

A district in Shenzhen has become known as 'Second Wife Village' for the number of mistresses living there. 

Shanshan’s $550 shoes came from her lover, but the soles of her feet, as hard as leather, came from her childhood. 

‘We used to play barefoot in the village,’ she told me. 

‘All the girls in the karaoke bar had feet like this.’
At 26, Shanshan has come a long way from rural Sichuan, one of China’s poorer southern provinces, famous for the ‘spiciness’ of its food and its women. 

Today her lover, Mr Wu, keeps her in a Beijing apartment that ‘cost 2.5 million yuan ($410,000)’, and visits whenever he can find the time away from his wife. 

In his late 40s, and an official with a massive state-run oil company, he was recently in Africa for six months developing an oilfield. 

Shanshan got bored and decided to improve her scant English by finding a ‘language-exchange partner’ online, which is how she and I became friends this spring.
Shanshan never referred to Wu as her boyfriend; he was her ‘man’, her ‘lover’, and occasionally her ‘uncle’. When she said ‘boyfriend’, she meant the man her own age back in Sichuan with whom she spent much of her free day exchanging text messages and whom she saw twice a year.
She’d walked the common path for country girls becoming mistresses, or ernai (literally, ‘second woman’). She’d gone to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, at 17, where she’d worked as a hostess at a karaoke bar at a hotel, before moving to Beijing to do the same. 

Her work involved entertaining men, including, if they paid enough, sleeping with them; that was how she’d met her lover, who’d offered to set her up after their fourth ‘date’.
It was an understandable decision on his part: Shanshan was sexy, merry, and smart. 

And for her, it was an obvious choice. 

An enormous amount of off-book money sloshes around Chinese business and officialdom, and some of it runs into handbags. 

As well as paying for her apartment and buying her gifts, Shanshan’s ‘uncle’ provided her with a living allowance of ‘about 20,000 yuan ($3,260) a month’. 

This was about the average for Beijing; in smaller towns, 10,000 yuan might be acceptable, or even 5,000. At the top end, a mistress might receive 10,000 yuan in spending money every day.
She was adamant that I never visit her apartment because she was surrounded by other ernai. 

Local estate agents target provincial officials and businessmen looking to put their money into Beijing’s property bubble, and the men fill up the apartments, bought as investments, with their women. 

‘Half of the apartments are empty,’ she explained. 

‘And the other half are full of girls. Everyone gossips. About money, about men. If they saw me with a foreigner, they’d talk about it for a month.’
Keeping a woman is common among powerful Chinese men. 

A study by the Crisis Management Centre at Renmin University in Beijing, published this January, showed that 95 per cent of officials had illicit affairs, usually paid for, and 60 per cent of them had kept a mistress.
Until recent crackdowns forced greater discretion, Chinese official life had two social circles. 

As the mobster Henry Hill puts it in the film Goodfellas (a key reference point for Chinese provincial officialdom): ‘Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night at the Copa was always for the girlfriends.’
At dinner with Shanshan, Xiaoxue and Lingling — two of Shanshan’s slightly older friends from Sichuan — they all agreed that the social circuit had disappeared of late, and that it had come largely as a relief. 

‘It used to be a big part of work,’ said Xiaoxue, who was kept by a businessman back in Sichuan. 

‘You had to make yourself look really pretty, and you had to make up to the most important people there, but not so much that the woman they came with would get jealous. But you still had to be…’ she started to flutter her eyelashes and raised her voice an octave: ‘Oh, you’re so clever! Oh, what important work you do! Oh, you’re really 55? You look so strong!’
‘That was how I came to Beijing,’ Lingling added. 

‘I was with an official in Neijiang [in Sichuan], and they were hosting an inspection visit. One of the officials who was visiting really liked me, and he asked the guy I was with then to lend me to him, in exchange for connections. So I slept with him while he was in Neijiang, and then he brought me up to Beijing. But it didn’t work out between us.’
‘If you’re an official, you have to have a mistress, or at least a girlfriend,’ Xiaoxue said, ‘otherwise you’re not a real man. I used to have this friend who was a fake mistress. She was best friends with a gay guy — not a “duck” [male prostitute], just a normal gay guy — who was an official’s boyfriend. So the official would pay her to come out with him and pretend to be his mistress.’
Most mistresses are rural women who come to the job through other sex work, picked up at the karaoke bars, massage parlours and nightclubs that are often an obligatory part of business socialising. 

Their work is about emotions as much as sex. 

As with western punters who seek the ‘girlfriend experience’ online, Chinese men want the illusion of intimacy. 

‘You have to be the girlfriend he wanted when he was 20,’ said Xiaoxue. 

‘He wants to believe that you would be with him even if he wasn’t paying.’
She distinguished being a mistress from short-term hostessing, where you had to be a perfect servant, always putting the man’s needs first. 

‘If you’re too nice to him all the time, he’ll know it isn’t true,’ Xiaoxue said. 

‘If he looks at another woman, you should be jealous and sulk all evening until he apologises, so he knows you care.’

As the saying goes: ‘Old oxen chew young grass’
Zheng Tiantian, a social anthropologist at the State University of New York, worked as a karaoke bar hostess for two years in Dalian to research her PhD. 

‘The most powerful men were identified as those who could emotionally and physically control the hostesses, exploit them freely, and then abandon them,’ she writes in her astonishing book on the experience, Red Lights (2009). 

But the women are equally mercenary. 

One of her informants comments: ‘I’d rather be a mistress than a wife, because you can make much more as a mistress.’
At the same time, both sides desperately seek real feeling, even as they try to conceal it from their contemporaries. 

In Red Lights, Zheng depicts men who value ‘real friendship’ and ‘sincerity’ in the women they pay for, and women who ‘inflict scars on their hands and wrists’ in order to ‘remind themselves of the ruthless game they are engaged in’.
Shanshan, who normally held her ‘uncle’ in affectionate contempt, became worried about his stay in Africa. ‘Six months is a long time,’ she said. 

‘Do you think he’ll sleep with a black girl? I don’t think so; black girls all have AIDS. He wouldn’t cheat on me. Would he?’
The pragmatic approach of rural women leaves them better off than the educated urban girls who can also end up as mistresses. 

These urban women usually meet older men through regular work, and the relationship begins through genuine attraction. 

As they’ve maintained their ‘purity’ through not being involved in other sex work, they have a higher market value than the rural girls, and they’re more socially acceptable at high-end occasions.
A further distinction is sometimes made between ernai, who ‘know their place’, and xiaosan, ‘little threes’ (as in ‘third party’), who try to insinuate themselves between a lover and his wife with the aim of forcing divorce and remarriage. 

In practice, the terms are used interchangeably, but the difference matters especially to urban girls seeking to distinguish themselves from their rural counterparts.
‘Most xiaosan have a steady job and a higher educational background than an ernai. Xiaosan expect to marry the man because they’ve invested so much: their youth and their love,’ explains the 22-year-old founder of a website for xiaosan in Richard Burger’s Behind the Red Door: Sex in China (2012).
In my experience, many of the women expect never to marry their lover. 

One urban woman, Yu, told me: ‘I have money. My family is rich enough. I even have an apartment of my own. I just wanted to be his mistress so that he wouldn’t have other girlfriends. Apart from his wife.’
For Wen, now in her early 40s, with permed hair and lacquered nails, the limits had once been equally clear. As a young office worker in Beijing, she dated a north-eastern property developer worth tens of millions of dollars. 

‘I knew he had to have a wife,’ she said. 

‘I’m not stupid. But I thought I was his ernai, and that he loved me. Then I found that he kept three others around the city. I was his “fifth woman”, not the second.’

While a rural mistress might think first of her bank balance, an affair that starts emotionally (of which there has been an explosion) can have dramatic consequences. 

‘I never imagined that the one I loved so much, the one who lived four years with me, would become my enemy,’ Ji Yingnan, 26, told The Independent newspaper in July this year after exposing her lover Fan Yue’s corruption. 

Fan was the deputy director of the State Archives, a position he leveraged to fund a lifestyle of extravagant spending and foreign trips with Ji.
When they met, Fan was middle-aged, and Ji was 22. 

As the saying goes: ‘Old oxen chew young grass.’ 

In all such relationships, the age gap is a depressing constant. 

In high-end restaurants, I like to play ‘Mistress or daughter?’ while looking at the seated couples. 

Even the waxen former president Hu Jintao was once rumoured to have ‘a mistress younger than his daughter’.
What’s more, some young Chinese women infantilise themselves, often with the aid of plastic surgery, to imitate the big-eyed heroines of Japanese cartoons. 

The aesthetic is popular with older men, who are aroused not just by the fragile look, but by affected sa jiao, ‘cute whining’, done in the fashion of a demanding child. 

In their private pictures, the girls look all of 14, while the men play alongside them in childish games or make faces at the camera.
I suspect that the image of innocence reinforces the men’s belief in their mistress’s sincerity, and allows them to believe that they’re not exploiting the woman, but offering protection. 

The urban women I talked to believed this far more than their rural counterparts. 

For many of them, the comforting image of a protective father/lover figure prevailed. 

‘I thought I would always be safe with him,’ said one woman. 

‘I liked him so much I even arranged a threesome for his birthday. And I paid the other girl!’
Chinese men’s penchant for mistresses is sometimes attributed to deep-seated cultural expectations, and it’s true that Chinese culture has rarely paid even lip service to ideas of male fidelity. 

Yet modern reformers often singled out concubinage as a sign of China’s backwardness, and pressed for stronger roles for women. 

Some, such as modern China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen, or its first chairman, Mao Tse-tung, did so even as they pressed teenage girls into their beds. 

Modern mistress-keeping might seem like a step back to the distant past. 

But this is just an excuse: any society as dominated by male leaders, and with as vast a chasm between the elite and the poor, sees the same exploitation of young women by powerful men.
Besides, Shanshan and her friends seem less like victims and more like players, aware of the limits of their work and astutely using the vulnerabilities of powerful men for their own ends. 

I admire them; in a system profoundly rigged against women, sex workers, the young, the rural and the poor, they have found a way to get what they can. 

Although it comes at an emotional cost, they seem to have taken control of their own fates. 

True, they live off dirty money: the cash conjured up by their lovers is frequently drained from the public treasury, or extorted in bribes from others. 

But so do hotels, luxury goods stores, estate agents, and the millions of others in China and the West happy to profit from the consumption habits of China’s elite.
The rural women I met were the lucky ones. 

They had been smart, cynical, pretty, witty, or simply fortunate enough to score the top prize — to escape, relatively young, from the brutality of China’s sex trade, dominated by organised crime, and with rape or assault a daily risk, into positions that granted them meaningful agency.
That said, the toxic intersection of power, money and sex holds its dangers. 

Mistresses can end up going to prison, or worse. 

In 2006, Xu Zhiyuan, a Beijing district official, paid his driver to strangle his mistress for arguing with him over ‘trivialities’. 

Duan Yihe, a senior Jinan official, had his nephew-in-law rig his mistress’s car with a bomb in 2007. 

And in 2011, Luo Shaojie, another Beijing district chief, had his mistress chopped up and murdered by his assistant after she threatened to expose his corruption.
‘I know girls who got beaten up,’ Shanshan told me, ‘but my man would never do anything like that. 

He has a good heart; he loves his daughters so much. He’s always showing me pictures of them and telling me how they’re doing in school.’
In an online age, there are other risks, especially at a time when the gender imbalance caused by selective abortion has meant a shortage of young women and a consequent cadre of sexually frustrated, bitter young men. 

‘Slut-shaming’ is a regular habit on the Chinese internet: women exposed by angry ex-boyfriends or lovers’ wives have found themselves the target of a vast wave of abuse, including messages sent to their workplace or their parents.
The most recent ‘crackdown’ on corruption was launched with great fanfare by the new administration of the Chinese president Xi Jinping. 

But it has gone after such easy targets as hospitality budgets, official vehicles and foreign trips, while the real muscle has gone into hunting down dissidents, whistle-blowers and journalists who might actually threaten the powerful. 

As with anti-corruption campaigns of the past, mistresses make a convenient distraction. 

They feed the public appetite for scandal without challenging the way China’s power networks operate. 

The popular media portrays mistresses as ‘beauty attracting disaster’, and speaks of their ‘evil, poisonous nature’, as if the poor officials would never have tasted the apple of corruption without a woman to lure them on.
Yet beneath the public flaming, the pragmatism and cunning of some mistresses has made them folk heroes. One such is Li Wei: now 50, she worked her way up from the Vietnamese-Yunnan hinterlands to a personal fortune via a dozen or so powerful men. 

‘They’re smart women!’ commented my respectable landlady. 

‘These days, a woman has to look after her own bank.’ 

Women who expose their corrupt official lovers receive praise, ironic and otherwise. 

Even the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily has admitted to a grudging admiration.
Still, the public crusades against mistresses, no matter how rhetorical can, in some cases, prompt early retirement from a dangerous profession. 

For mistresses from rural backgrounds in particular, the work is ultimately a means to an end.

‘One of my key informants was kept by a wealthy man for more than seven years,’ the anthropologist Zheng Tiantian wrote to me. 

‘Her man bought her an apartment at the central location in Shanghai under her name, handed her a business under her name, and on top of that, bought her parents an apartment in a city next to their rural hometown. Her parents now work in their own supermarket that they opened. As for my informant, after she left the man two years ago, she went to a college to get a teaching certificate, when she met an ideal man [in her own words], and they were happily married last year.’ 

Zheng noted that most women ‘end the relationship with a sufficient amount of financial capital. They operate their own business while finding a man to marry.’
Or, like Shanshan, they’ll channel the bulk of their money into savings and investments. 

‘Do you think mining’s a good industry?’ Shanshan asked me once. 

‘My friend’s cousin has money in a Shaanxi mine, and she wants me to put 100,000 yuan in it.’ 

With other girls, she talked of stock markets, property, and how to get a Hong Kong bank account.
The social aspect of being a mistress can pay off big-time, too. 

After discovering her lover’s three other mistresses, Wen was able to translate the connections she’d made from socialising with his friends into her own property deals. 

Today she has ‘one house in Hainan, one house in Shanghai, and two houses in Beijing’, as well as a multi-million-dollar business of her own. 

Wen’s lover had made a generous final settlement on her because they had a son together. 

This is rare. 

Abortion is the norm, voluntary or otherwise.
‘You know about [the billionaire construction magnate] Wang?’ said my friend Li, a middle-aged businesswoman formidably tapped in to Beijing’s gossip networks. 

‘He had sex with a karaoke bar hostess at a party a couple of months ago. Now she’s started sending him text messages saying she’s pregnant. But she’s in hiding till the baby is actually born so that he can’t force her to have an abortion. His daughter is at Harvard, but his son has cerebral palsy. So she’s saying that she can give him a healthy son, and she doesn’t want to marry him, she just wants to look after their son. With enough money, of course.’
‘I don’t blame her,’ said Li. 

‘Women need to look out for themselves. Men always cheat.’

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Forging an Art Market in China

By David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox

BEIJING -- When the hammer came down at an evening auction during China Guardian’s spring sale in May 2011, “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree,” a 1946 ink painting by Qi Baishi, one of China’s 20th-century masters, had drawn a startling price: $65.4 million. 

No Chinese painting had ever fetched so much at auction, and, by the end of the year, the sale appeared to have global implications, helping China surpass the United States as the world’s biggest art and auction market.
But two years after the auction, Qi Baishi’s masterpiece is still languishing in a warehouse in Beijing. 

The winning bidder has refused to pay for the piece since doubts were raised about its authenticity.

Qi Baishi’s “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree” has not been paid for.

“The market is in a very dubious stage,” said Alexander Zacke, an expert in Asian art who runs Auctionata, an international online auction house. 

“No one will take results in mainland China very seriously.”
Indeed, even as the art world marvels at China’s booming market, a six-month review by The New York Times found that many of the sales — transactions reported to have produced as much as a third of the country’s auction revenue in recent years — did not actually take place.
Just as problematic, the market is flooded with forgeries, often mass-produced, and has become a breeding ground for corruption, as business executives curry favor with officials by bribing them with art.
Fraud is certainly no stranger to the international art world, but experts warn that the market here is particularly vulnerable because, like many industries in China, it has expanded too fast for regulators to keep pace.
In fact, few areas of business offer as revealing a view of this socialist society’s lurch toward capitalism as the art market. 

Like many luxury businesses in China, the explosion of buyers for art here has been fueled by the pent-up consumerism of the newly rich. 

The demand is so great that last year, in a country that barely had an art market two decades ago, reported auction revenues were up 900 percent over 2003 — to $8.9 billion. (The United States auction market for 2012 was $8.1 billion.)
While the luxury-buying habits in China often mimic those in the West, the demand for art reflects uniquely Chinese tastes. 

While the rest of the world bids up Pollocks and Rothkos, Chinese buyers typically pursue traditional Chinese pieces, some by 15th-century masters, and others by modern artists, like Zhang Daqian, one of many who have chosen to work in that old style.

Ceramic vases and jugs dry before being fired in the kilns at the Xiong Jianjun factory, one of China’s best-known makers of reproductions, in Jingdezhen, the ancient center of porcelain making.

This very reverence for the cultural past is now contributing greatly to the surge in forgeries. 

Artists here are trained to imitate the old Chinese masters, and they routinely produce high-quality copies of paintings and other works, such as ceramics and jade artifacts. 

That tradition has intersected with the newly lucrative art market, in which reproductions that so many have the skills to create are often offered as the real thing. 

It would be hard to create a more fertile environment for the proliferation of fakes.
“This is the challenge right now,” said Wang Yannan, the president and director of China Guardian, the nation’s second-biggest auction house. 

“In the mind of every Chinese, the first question is whether it’s fake.”
For years, much of the forgery went unnoticed as works passed from buyer to buyer, their prices spiraling up. 

But, increasingly, high-profile scandals are exposing the extent of the fakery and sowing doubts about the larger market. 

In one case, three years ago, an oil painting attributed to the 20th-century artist Xu Beihong, which sold at auction for more than $10 million, turned out to have been produced 30 years after the artist’s death by a student during a class exercise at one of China’s leading arts academies.
Even more embarrassing was the government’s decision last July to close a private museum in Hebei because of suspicions that nearly everything in it — all 40,000 artifacts, including a Tang dynasty porcelain vase — were fake.
“There’s always been forgers on the market, but it’s a matter of proportion,” said Robert D. Mowry, a former curator of Asian art at Harvard who is now a consultant for Christie’s.
Concern about fraud and a cooling economy seem to have tempered enthusiasm in the Chinese art market. After peaking in 2011, reported revenues dropped off 24 percent last year, according to Arts Economics, a research company that studies the international market. 

This year is expected to be modestly better than 2012.
The Chinese auction industry and the government have taken notice, and say they are looking to clean up the abuses and stem further damage to consumer confidence, especially since the art market is actually perceived by many as one of the safer places to invest.
“A majority of Chinese people do not trust the Chinese stock market,” said Melanie Ouyang Lum, a consultant on Chinese art. 

“The housing boom has slowed tremendously. A lot of people are looking to art for investment.”
In fact, Zhang Daqian, a 20th-century artist known for his landscapes, is one of several Chinese painters who have joined Picasso and Warhol as the best-selling artists in the world even though their names hardly register outside collecting circles.

China has identified culture as a core area for economic growth, and a vibrant art market as a useful tool of soft power, promoting a view of Chinese society as a center of aesthetics and beauty and deflecting the international focus from political and human rights issues. 

The Chinese are handicapped in cleaning up the art market, though, by a weakness in their laws, which absolve auction houses of any responsibility if a work turns out to be fake.
The forgery problem helps account for the soaring number of payment defaults. 

In the past three years, a study of sales at mainland auction houses by the China Association of Auctioneers found that about half the sales of artworks worth more than $1.5 million — a major portion of the market — were not completed because the buyer failed to pay what was owed. (For major auction houses in the United States, the default rate for works of the same value is negligible, several experts said.)
“It has something to do with the general environment in China,” said Zhang Yanhua, the association chairwoman. 

“As you know, China is still trying to build the rule of law in this country.”

Other explanations for the wave of defaults and late payments, experts say, include instances in which bidders got buyer’s remorse or just bid up a price to increase the value of works by a particular artist they collect.
Even when you factor in faulty revenue reporting, the rise in art buying over the past decade has been meteoric, with Chinese banks, state-owned companies and business tycoons continuing to invest in the boom. 

Art has become a kind of currency, and collecting is so popular in China now that auctions are often mobbed. 

On Chinese television, more than 20 programs offer tips on collecting and on identifying cultural relics, and late-night infomercials promise quick riches to viewers who purchase a $2,500 collection of works by former students of renowned masters. 

Purchase today, the ad declares, and you can immediately secure a profit of $100,000. 

With so much at stake, Chinese art dealers have rushed to Europe and America to buy back Chinese relics. There has also been a rash of museum thefts involving Chinese antiquities. 

And a black market in artifacts has emerged, with so-called tomb raiders digging up buried treasures that they can sell.

At a time when some other markets are drawing fewer investors, packaged collections of paintings in the traditional style are advertised on infomercials as having a huge potential returns.

The interest in addressing the market’s weaknesses may have played a role in China’s recent decision to loosen longstanding rules that restrict Western auction houses from access to the Chinese market.
Now Sotheby’s has a joint venture with a state-run company, and Christie’s won a license this year to become the first international auction house to operate independently in China — developments that may serve to foster competition and higher standards in the market. 

Ms. Zhang, the head of the auction association, said bringing in the Western auction houses was like putting a crocodile in a pond.
“It makes the fish swim faster,” she said.

The Rising Price of Culture
Less than a decade ago, the Chinese art market was still quite sleepy, a legacy of the Cultural Revolution when luxury items were viewed as bourgeois and the Red Guards raided homes, seizing and destroying art.
Ma Weidu, a major collector based in Beijing, recounted how easy it still was in the 1980s to secure small artifacts. 

People gave them to him for nothing, he said, or traded them for a few cigarettes. 

Occasionally, he would pay a small fee.

Ma Weidu, a major collector who picked up some pieces in exchange for cigarettes after the Cultural Revolution devalued art.

“They’d say: ‘Take it all. All I want is a washing machine,’” he recalled.
The auctioning of art remained rare until the early 1990s, when the government lifted restrictions on the sale of cultural relics. 

Still, the art market did not begin to take off until 2004, fueled by rising incomes.
Now there are more than 350 Chinese auction houses that deal in fine arts. 

The two largest — Poly International Auction company, and China Guardian — are billion-dollar enterprises with offices in several cities, including Tokyo and New York, and close ties to the country’s ruling elite.
But as the market has grown, so has its dark underbelly. 

Price manipulation is rampant, analysts say, as collectors and investors, perhaps an art investment fund with large holdings in a particular artist, bid up a work to boost the value of their entire inventory. 

Sometimes, experts say, auction houses themselves throw in fake bids. 

The Chinese have a name for the price-boosting process. 

They call it “stir frying.”

Qi Baishi’s Fish and Shrimp

While some collectors care deeply about their art, even exhibiting it in their own elaborate private museums, many buyers are primarily investors looking to flip a work for profit, experts say. 

Objects are sold and resold. 

One painting by Qi Baishi, “Fish and Shrimp,” sold four times at auction in the 10 years ending last December, the price climbing to $794,000 from $30,000 in 2002, before trailing off last year to $552,000.
Resale opportunities are a priority for many buyers. 

At an auction in Beijing last month, four men from Guangzhou bought several paintings worth tens of thousands of dollars. 

“Most people you see here, we don’t have a real job, we are traders,” said one of the men, in a white bomber jacket. 

“We buy them and resell them to educated, wealthy people.”
Analysts say that flipping artwork contributes to the market’s nonpayment problem. 

Before an auction, a buyer might find a collector interested in a piece and bid successfully for it, but refuse to pay if the deal with the collector falls through.
And then there are the payment problems that arise because China’s art market is, economically speaking, so young, and its rich are so recently minted.
“There is still a big difference between East and West in understanding whether raising a paddle at an auction is actually a binding contract or not,” said Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. 

“Some young starlet buys a bunch of paintings at an auction, walks out and says, ‘Nos. 13, 11, 7, 6, 5 those are the ones I don’t want.’ It happens all the time.”
Auction houses have typically papered over the nonpayments, reporting aborted transactions as true sales, even posting record prices and seldom correcting the record. 

This has misleadingly burnished their revenues, making the market seem hotter and propping up prices, industry experts said.
The practice has so alarmed the Chinese authorities, who worry that it could undermine the credibility of the market, that the auction association and state bodies like the ministries of commerce and culture stepped in a few years ago.
As part of a larger program of reforms, the association now collects nonpayment data and publishes its findings in an effort to expose malefactors. 

It not only encourages auction houses to blacklist buyers with a history of not paying, but also recommends that the houses require steep deposits from potential bidders. 

The government has canceled or suspended the licenses of 150 auction houses between 2008 and 2011 for a variety of problems, including the sale of fake items.
Even with the fraud and fakery, many collectors and investors say there is too much excitement and profit in the market to warrant dropping out, especially when new money keeps showing up at auctions, ready to buy.
“In the newspapers, there are always stories of someone buying something for a dollar and selling it for a million,” said Rui Zhang, who runs the art market and management programs at Tsinghua University in Beijing. 

But Jiang Yinfeng, an artist, critic and curator, said that the people who suffer in such an overheated market are often those with little experience in such matters. 

“Some of my friends use their houses as collateral to buy art items,” he said. 

“Some of them take high-interest loans.”
One engine driving the Chinese art market has been the culture of gift-giving, which prompts provincial officials to arrive en masse in Beijing during the Mid-Autumn Festival in September, further clogging the congested streets as they ferry presents of art, alcohol and other items to senior government officials.
But art is also used in more elaborate bribery schemes. 

In some cases, an official will receive a work of art with instructions to put it up for auction; a businessman will use it as the currency for a bribe, purchasing the art at an inflated price and giving the official a tidy profit.
“Unlike cash, the value is less obvious,” said Zhang Pingjie, a curator at the Himalayas Art Museum in Shanghai.
Whether the given work is real often doesn’t matter, experts say, because the buyer intends to spend lavishly anyway. 

And were the scheme to be discovered, the minimal value of a fake would mean a lesser punishment.
The bribery of public officials with art is so widespread that the Chinese have coined a term to describe this kind of aesthetic corruption.
They call it “yahui” or “elegant bribery.”
One such bribery case occurred several years ago when the city of Chongqing cracked down on the gangsters who controlled its buses, taxis and gambling parlors.
In 2009, the authorities detained the man who had protected the criminals: the city’s own deputy police chief, Wen Qiang.
Searches of Mr. Wen’s properties turned up watches, wine and other items typical of graft around the world, including $3 million in cash wrapped in oil paper and submerged in a fish pond.
But investigators also discovered a surprisingly expansive and expensive collection of art at Mr. Wen’s mountainside villa and another home he kept at the Crabapple Moon Residences. 

He had been given, they said, more than 100 works, including fine ivory sculptures and a Buddha head carved from stone. 

Valuable calligraphy scrolls were stored in a ceramic container. 

A painting attributed to Zhang Daqian rested on a bookshelf.
Mr. Wen was executed for his crimes the next year.
“Who is in the auction market?” asked Li Yanjun, an art expert and authenticator at Beijing Oriental University.
“Government officials,” he said. 

“They hide and have people bid for them, or buy up their works.”

An ornate jade dressing table and stool, sold in 2011 as Han dynasty antiquities, later proved to have been made just a year earlier.

Brand New Antiquities

The stool and dressing table were a set, carved from jade and said to date from the Han dynasty, some 2,000 years ago. 

Their sale at auction in Beijing two years ago drew $33 million and lots of fanfare.
But then experts began pointing out that Chinese did not sit on chairs during the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 220). 

They sat on the floor.

Eventually, a leader of the jade trade in Pizhou, a village in Jiangsu Province in eastern China, acknowledged that the pieces had been created by craftsmen there in 2010.
Wang Rumian, former president of the Pizhou Gemstone and Jade Industry Association, said in an interview last month that it had been the art dealers, not the craftsmen, who chose to pass off the set as ancient.
“It wasn’t made that well,” he insisted.
But it was good enough to fool the Chinese art market and draw a record price for jade that year.
The trail of phony “antiques,” bogus paintings and fake bronzes winds throughout China these days. 

In Jingdezhen, a city in the rugged mountains of southeast China, small workshops produce exquisite reproductions of Ming and Qing dynasty porcelain, the craftsmen going to some lengths to build the wood-fired kilns that help create the subtle textures and glazes.
In Yanjian, a dusty village in central Henan Province, they use ammonia on bronze to induce corrosion and produce that same greenish, oxidized patina that comes from exposure, allowing a bell or ritual wine vessel made a few days ago to pass for an artifact unearthed from a tomb.

And in Beijing, Tianjin, Suzhou and Nanjing, highly skilled painters and calligraphers are replicating the brush strokes of revered masters.
So-called traditional Chinese paintings typically depict the natural beauty of mountains, rivers and forests in an ancient style, and, together with calligraphy, are the workhorses of China’s art market, accounting for nearly half the money taken in at auction last year. 

So, throughout the country, painters work to copy masters like Qi Baishi and Fu Baoshi.
“I’ve seen 700 to 800 people in a painting workshop, with a clear division of labor, making the works of Qi Baishi,” says Zhang Jinfa, a professional arts authenticator based in Beijing.
A study last year by Artron, an art data company based in China, estimated that as many as 250,000 people in about 20 Chinese cities may be involved in producing and selling fakes. 

Visits to several of these cities in recent months documented that such production centers are thriving.
Thousands of people in Jingdezhen, the ancient center of porcelain making, are employed by its bustling workshops, where bare-chested craftsmen sit hunched over, spinning clay into ancient forms. 

Down the production line, painters dip their brushes in ink and copy the outlines of flowers or traditional Chinese patterns onto the pottery. 

Often, the images are taken directly from auction catalogs that are pressed open on a nearby table.
One of the best-known ceramic reproduction makers in Jingdezhen is Xiong Jianjun, who spent eight years making a copy of a Qianlong vase at the request of the National Museum in Beijing.
“You need to study the fundamentals and decipher what they did back then,” said Mr. Xiong, who said some of his reproductions have been sold without his consent as antiquities.

Workers recreating antique ceramics from clay at Xiong Jianjun’s factory, which specializes in such reproductions. Mr. Xiong spent eight years making a copy of a Qianlong vase at the request of the National Museum in Beijing. 

In China, the tradition of copying reflects more than a simple reverence for the past; it is an appreciation that beauty has been captured in a fashion worth emulating. 

Unlike the West, where “the shock of the new” is admired, China values tradition, and its best-selling works often pay homage to, and look like, those made hundreds of years earlier.
At prestigious art schools, students engage in what the Chinese refer to as “lin mo,” or imitating the masters. Forgery and fraud are not necessarily part of the tradition, experts say, though famous painters like Zhang Daqian, who died 30 years ago, took pleasure in fooling the experts.
“Zhang Daqian felt he was an equal to the old masters,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, chairman of the Asian art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

“And so the true test was whether he could copy them. “
One story that illustrates Mr. Zhang’s playful approach to copying concerns his 1967 trip to review an exhibition of the works of Shitao, a 17th-century painter, at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. 

His tour guides were proud to show him the works of such a famous painter, who had died more than two centuries earlier. 

So they were surprised when Mr. Zhang began to laugh and point to various works on the wall, saying: “I did that! And that.”
“That is how Zhang Daqian talked,” said Marshall Wu, a retired professor at the University of Michigan who first met Mr. Zhang in the 1960s. 

“You never really knew if he was serious or kidding. But he did a lot of Shitao forgeries.”
Mr. Zhang’s work now serves as a model for a painter in Beijing, Liang Zhaojin, who studied with the master and now works in his own classical style that is based on that tradition.

Liang Zhaojin 

“I am honoring Master Zhang,” he said, “by inheriting and promoting his style.”
It is easier to detect fakes, of course, when the artists are still alive. 

Artron recently collected 100 works attributed to a popular painter, He Jiaying, and, with his help, determined that about 80 were fakes.
“Basically, everything is controlled by middlemen,” said Wu Shu, a writer who has posed as an art dealer and published three books on the subject, including, “Who Is Swindling China?”
“They generally divide the goods into three categories: the best-quality things go to the auction market; midlevel works go to the antiquity markets; and lower-level things go to flea markets,” Mr. Wu said.
Experts say some Chinese dealers and consignors slip works into auction by doctoring old sales catalogs to invent a provenance, and — if all else fails — paying an auction house specialist to include a suspect item.
Auction houses need impressive consignments to attract collectors, and experts say that, in their desperation for inventory, many have ordered forgeries.
“I would say 80 percent of the lots at small and medium-sized auction houses are replicas,” said Xiao Ping, a prominent painter who formerly worked as an authentication adviser to the Nanjing Museum.

Qi Baishi, an often imitated modern master of traditional Chinese painting, who died in 1957.

Immortal Creativity

Qi Baishi was a master of the ordinary. 

In the summer of 1957, with his health deteriorating, the painter went into the studio of his traditional courtyard residence in Beijing, dabbed his brush in ink and created a portrait of a flower, a long-stemmed raspberry-and-yellow peony.
Three months later, he was dead, at 93.
“That was the last work he completed,” said his grandson Qi Bingyi, who keeps the painting locked in a safe at his home in Beijing. 

“I have it right here. Do you want to see it?” he said before unrolling the work for visitors last month.
Death, however, seems to have done little to curb Qi Baishi’s productivity, according to auction records and interviews with experts and his family. 

They indicate that rising values and his popularity as one of China’s greatest modern painters have led to a flood of fake Qi Baishis on the market.
Liu Xilin, editor of “The Complete Works of Qi Baishi at the Beijing Fine Arts Academy,” said about half the Qi Baishi works that come up for auction in China are fake. 

“I can see that by just looking at their catalogs.”
In the past 20 years, works attributed to Qi Baishi have been put up for auction more than 27,000 times in China.
In one sign of the mania, 5,600 works attributed to Qi Baishi came on the market in 2011, up from 381 works in 2000.
Qi Baishi, born in 1864 into a peasant family, herded cows and worked as a carpenter’s apprentice before taking up painting at 27. 

Fame came a few decades later, after he moved to Beijing and adopted a fluid, almost calligraphylike style, using an ink wash.
He specialized in vivid landscapes and portraits of nature, documenting begonias, dragonflies, grasshoppers, frogs, chickens, crabs and shrimp, lots of shrimp.
Scholars say he was prolific and estimate he produced between 10,000 and 15,000 works in his lifetime. 

Of those, about 3,000 are in the collections of major museums and some are assumed to have been destroyed during the Japanese invasion in the 1930s or during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards looted and occupied his family’s home.
Auction records, though, show that more than 18,000 distinctive works by Qi Baishi have been offered for sale since 1993, an impossible number, if the expert estimates are right.
In a study this year, Artron said many of China’s leading modern artists are being counterfeited, but none more so than Qi Baishi. 

Arnold Chang, who ran Sotheby’s Chinese painting division in the 1980s, is equally emphatic.
“There is no doubt,” he said, “that there are far more works ascribed to Qi Baishi in the market than he could have possibly painted, even with an assembly line of assistants — which he supposedly had.”
Just about every major city in China has an art dealer who claims access to high-quality Qi Baishi fakes. They are often sold as reproductions, as are many of the elaborate counterfeits created here, but experts say many of them invariably end up at auction, rebranded as the real thing.
Qi Baishi’s own family, some of them painters, aggressively promote themselves as descendants of the famous artist in order to sell their works, done in his style.
“Some distant relatives can’t even draw very well, and they go out and claim they are Qi Baishi’s family,” said Qi Binghui, a granddaughter of the artist, who is based in Beijing.

“If you’re going to do something in your grandfather’s name, at least live up to his standard.”
Family members say they have been pressed to authenticate fakes, to pose for photos with pieces that might go to auction and even to mass-produce famous works by Qi Baishi.
“I can tell you I was once asked to go to Thailand to justify a batch of 20 fake paintings claimed to be my grandfather’s,” Qi Binghui said.

“That person was trying to sell those fake paintings in Thailand, and he wanted me to assure the buyers that they were real.”
Concern over fake Qi Baishis is now a challenge for auction houses. 

China Guardian, the big auction house, says it has an enviable record of spotting fakes, and most experts agree that its reputation stands above all others. 

But in the spring of 2011, China Guardian marketed “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree” as the classic masterpiece the painter had created decades earlier to honor the birthday of Chiang Kai-shek, then president.
The work was put up for sale by Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver turned wealthy financier, who has become one of China’s largest art collectors. 

He sold it as a set with a calligraphic couplet Qi Baishi wrote to accompany the painting, and the auction house estimated it could bring in as much as $20 million.
On a cool evening in May, bidding on the work went back and forth for more than 30 minutes as a collector in the room jousted with someone calling in bids by telephone. 

When the hammer fell at a record $65.4 million, the room burst into applause.
The euphoria did not last long, though. 

An art critic, Mou Jianping, soon suggested that the work might be fake, and the bidder decided not to pay. 

Two years later, the buyer has effectively defaulted on the item.
Mr. Liu declined to comment on the failed sale.
But in an interview last month, Kou Qin, director and vice president of China Guardian, described the nonpayment problem in the market as “a very bad phenomenon,” but one that will be fought. 

His company reduced its nonpayment rate for the most expensive items to 17 percent last year.
“Lack of honor,” he said. 

“It is a problem faced by the whole of society.”

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